What your sales pitch might say

I'm a big NPR listener. I love the stories: This American Life, Wait wait don't tell me, and BBC news. I've been avoiding it recently, though, because there is one frequent commercial that gets so under my skin it spoils my day.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has an advertisement promoting its superb facilities and excellent care. The commercial also has its narrator, a sweet sounding woman, say: "where you are treated first can make all the difference."

Formerly, I was a hospice chaplain. While standing at bedsides, I regularly heard people blame their doctors for their impending death. As the Center Director at Good Grief, I also hear people accuse doctors of malpractice. The feelings I hear most often, though, are ones of guilt and regret: "if only we looked into that bump on his neck sooner" or "I should have seen those symptoms and realized."

The one thing the marketing people at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and other hospitals and medical agencies don't realize is that the messages they are conveying to the ill affect the grieving of those struggling to make meaning and sense out of the death of their family member. So, the wife who didn't nag her husband to get care sooner might feel even more at fault for not getting her husband first treated at a place that "would have [made] all the difference."

Similarly, the messages we convey and the things we say to the bereaved can get the wheels spinning. A person who didn't feel guilty for their partner's death may start to ask him or herself if the outcome would have been different if a better first choice was made. The truth of the matter is many people are uninformed about an illness before they are diagnosed and they make decisions based on their trust of the medical system. A lot of folks essentially roll with the punches, and it is in retrospect that ideas of "if I chose more wisely or differently this wouldn't have happened to me/us!" When we process our grief we often look for answers, analyze our actions, and imagine a different outcome.

So, I think it is crucial that we seriously reflect on what our words might actually say to the grieving. This is a population of people that is always with us and which more often than not looks to its community, and the messages that community is putting forth, in order to make sense of something very big that has happened to them.